For the past two years, I’ve been steadily working on a middle grade novel about a lonely 12-year-old girl in small-town Wisconsin who meets four siblings with a dangerous fantasy world. While I was under no illusions that I was…
As you may know, Dead Darlings, “the site for everything novel,” is a production of GrubStreet’s year-long program, the Novel Incubator. Founded by novelist and GrubStreet’s artistic director, Christopher Castellani, and developed with novelists and Grub instructors, Lisa Borders and Michelle Hoover, the Incubator takes…
All writers should read. We all read what we want, what we love, and most writers I know read their friends’ books, but are you reading your genre? Reading other books in your genre lets you know what current writing…
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a best book of…
So, First Draft, we meet again. I just finished your brother a few weeks ago and stuck him in a (virtual) drawer. Don’t worry. You’re definitely meeting the same fate. Oh, stop screaming. Doesn’t the certainty of what’s going to…
I had written twenty, maybe thirty, pages of my first draft when I had the idea of setting the climax at a theme party. I thought it would be fun to put my characters into costumes and get them in…